Simon Critchley has as eye for the bizarre and unseemly side of philosophy. In today’s reading we learn that Diogenes abused himself in the marketplace, saying he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing his stomach. It’s not too surprising to learn that he never married, but it is dispiriting to think of him as the original poster boy for cosmopolitanism.* Maybe he just meant to abuse public decency laws everywhere in the world… like fellow Cynics Hipparchia (herself a disappointing “first female philosopher” who was bettered by Hypatia**) and Crates. I do like his comment on Plato’s metaphysics: The table and cup I see, but I do not see tableness and cupness.
*Carl Sagan’s notion of what it means to be a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the cosmos, is far more inspiring. We speak for Earth:
Also noted by Critchley:
>There is no more relevant ancient philosopher for our time than Epicurus, who said “when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city… living well and dying well are one and the same.”
>For Seneca, anxiety is caused by fear for the future… The philosopher enjoys a long life because he does not worry over its shortness. He lives in the present… the only immortality that philosophy can promise is to permit us to inhabit the present without concern for the future.
>For Stoics, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, the human being is a compound of soul and body. But soul for the Stoics is “divine breath.” At death it is rejoins the “divine macrocosm”– not unlike the Taoist image of soul as a drop re-absorbed by Mother Sea.
>Epictetus, an early exponent of self-reliance, said we are “disturbed not by things but by the opinions which we have of things”… If we keep death constantly before our eyes and in our mouths, then our terror of it and our attachment to worldly things will fall away.
>Marcus Aurelius said “live each day as though one’s last”… Death is only a thing of terror for those unable to live in the present.
But, crucially: “living in the present” is not the same as not caring about the future. Real cosmopolitans care. We may cultivate an attitude of indifference towards our personal, individual deaths, but the prospective, premature, self-inflicted death of our species would be something to mourn. It’s also– and this may be un-Stoical– something to deplore and to resist, while we’re still here to do it.
*Sagan also composed the best tribute I’ve seen to Hypatia, who said in a most Saganesque moment: To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.
The two great pronouncements of Jewish doubt– or as I prefer, spirit– are the Books of Job (between 600 and 400 BCE) and Ecclesiastes (250-225 BCE). Both exalt an inquisitive and challenging sensibility, a clear-eyed reaching for justice in the face of life’s least tolerable facts that concedes nothing to implacable mystery.
The influence of Epicurus seems to pervade the latter especially, with his most solid practical wisdom transmitted by Ecclesiaastes’ author Koheleth: Love your spouse. Get some work to do… enjoy the simple pleasures. Forget worldly recompense; forget the afterlife; forget being watched or judged by God. And hardest of all, for most of us in this world of vanity: forget being remembered. Oh, and don’t expect life to be fair. Under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong etc.
Bart Ehrman: “It cannot be overlooked that in the divine response from the whirlwind to Job’s passionate and desperate plea for understanding why he, an innocent man, is suffering so horribly, no answer is given… suffering does not come for known causes or known reasons. Suffering just comes, and we need to deal with it as best we can.” God’s Problem
Ecclesiastes, like Job, before him, ends up surrendering. There is no reason to struggle against the great, and the crazy, and the evil: we ought simply to be glad we are alive.
Why? Why can’t we be glad but also gird our loins and get out there and scrap for justice? As James said, life feels like a fight so let’s go.
That doesn’t mean we refuse to acknowledge our appreciation for life’s treasures. Woody Allen’s answer to Job, in the person of his schoolgirl friend Tracy, deserves to be heard. “You’re God’s answer to Job.You would have ended all argument between them.He’d have said “I do a lot of terrible things but I can also make one of these.” And Job would’ve said “OK, you win.”
But– sorry, Woody– that’s just too Hollywood. This is a bit trivializing too, but I still like it:
At first, Job’s friends counsel passive acceptanceof his accumulating scourges– including the deaths of his loved ones– with a centuries-early foreshadowing of Leibnizian theodicy. Job must have deserved this punishment, since it was happening, so it must be all for the best. Right.
His faith finally stretched beyond possibility by cruelly-targeted conspiratorial assault, Job quite reasonably explodes: Miserable comforters are ye all… I loathe my life. He begins at last to press an aggressive prosecution… but then crumbles when faced with God’s righteous indignation, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of earth” etc.
God’s defense offers no apologies, no promises of ultimate justice, nothing but the rhetorical equivalent of a smack-down. He is great, Job is puny and ignorant, so just shut up. Might makes right, as Plato’s Thrasymachus would have it. Not nice.
And Job caves. I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. What?!!?
There’s nothing for Job to apologize for, from any reasonable standpoint. We have an explanation for most of the natural wonders in Job… we feel the opposite of how Job did (small and powerless). OK, we’re still small enough to warrant some humility. But we’ve been places and understood some natural phenomena, we’re not worms. We don’t need to grovel, and He’s got some explaining to do, to have as little sense of justice as the universe exhibits… What kind of God is that? If the main reason for persisting in believing in God is that he made the world and all the creatures in it, it will be hard to argue that he does not have the power to make it a less actively dangerous and chaotic world.
Job may have relented, and accepted his substitute/consolation family, but he did get sort of get the last word: after the Book of Job, God never speaks again.
And btw: how about an explanation of the no-time before time itself began? Yes, we know: that’s hard.
Today’s Passion for Wisdom sections jet us from Plato’s and Aristotle’s Athens past Greek and Roman Stoics and Skeptics to African animists and Meso-American Incas and Aztecs. All pose big imponderable questions: What is real? How real is experience, compared with ideas? What does “reality” mean? Where to begin?
Perhaps with Plato and Aristotle, and the messages implicit in their body language in the famous Raphael painting “School of Athens.” Plato’s gesture bespeaks his two-worlds philosophy, according to which our everyday experience is less real than “Ideas” and “Essences” (or “Forms”) in contrast with Aristotle’s more grounded view that ideas and forms are in the things at our feet.
Then there’s Plato’s cave with its image of some very strange prisoners, on his view much “like ourselves.” On Plato’s telling, Socrates was a cave-dweller who was willling to return to the cave, to “descend to human affairs,” and was persecuted for doing it. This is an allegory about the search for wisdom, the willingness to be unpopular in its pursuit, and the dangers that befall persons who – like Socrates – personify courage and intellectual integrity. It’s a plea to tolerate and even encourage dissenting voices and different ways of thinking and living. It’s also, as noted, a symbol of Plato’s “two world” metaphysics, about which Socrates typically was agnostic.
And – in modern terms – it’s a warning to resist the allure of the cave and its reassuring but shadowy unreality. Many of our caves, and the flickering images on their walls, are warm and dry and wired. But would Plato think they were an improvement?
Aristotle might not think much better of our pastimes, but he did not distrust the senses; he used them to observe, collect, and experiment. There is no place and no need for a theory of Forms, a theory of another world.
Stoics had an almost fanatic faith in reason.
They regarded emotions as irrational judgments that make us frustrated and unhappy. Like Buddha they urged: minimize your desires and you will minimize your suffering.
Anger is pointless and can only be self-destructive. Love and friendship can be dangerous.
The wise form only limited attachments. Stoics and skeptics value the feeling of at-homeness above all, and (like Buddhists?) perceive “attachment” as that feeling’s greatest threat. More on this from Simon Critchley next time.
Halfway ’round the world, while the Greeks and Romans were getting themselves memorialized in our cultural histories, reflected in our classic architecture, and inspiring generations of Vulcans et al, the Aztecs and Olmec (who seem to come up in class at every sports season transition… how ’bout ‘dem Saints!) and Navaho and other native Americans were creating their own rich– but because mainly oral, now obscure– traditions. Like their contemporaries on the African continent they became animists and sought soul and spirit everywhere. The voodoo supernaturalism of this perspective can be off-putting to a logically-minded Stoic or Skeptic, but there are other chords in the Meso-American and African worldviews that speak directly to some of our most pressing planetary concerns. We are a part of the Earth, we are dependent on it, and it is dependent on us. We have ecological responsibilities; the world around us, “nature,” is not just a resource… we are nature… nature is essentially spiritual.
It was one of those Saturdays* in the life of a parent whose pre-driving age daughters needed transport to some ‘cross-town destination or other every couple of hours, and whose spouse’s Ford needed the dealer’s attention too. Only really perched in one spot for any length of time, at Younger Daughter’s friend’s birthday party where it was fun catching up with the b’day girl’s dad, my friend the Vandy English prof.
We quickly covered the usual ground, before time to cut the cake: how we’re feeling the pinch of academic belt-tightening (but of course it’s still a lot looser in Private Endowment Land where he works), what we’re working on, where we’re going for collegial conferences (Charlotte in my case, possibly China in his), who we like in the Super Bowl and how we’re both stifling our objections to the game itself as a blood sport to enjoy the great spectacle. (My pick: Saints.)
And then out came his iPhone, which was also the party cam, so naturally I had to show him my favorite new Apps. He was excited to learn of Dragon dictation (it’s free, & easy), and InstaPaper, and Evernote. And I was amused to learn of an app that you actually take to bed with you– literally lying down in darkness with your device– to monitor your noctural restlessness and implicit REM sleep so as to wake you at the optimal moment, provide graphs and stats analyzing your sleep patterns, etc.
Sleeping with the enemy? Or is the prospect of our species’ radical transformation a friendly one? Either way, it gives a bit more heft to the transhumanist forecast of a day, coming rapidly down the accelerating pike of exponential technological growth, when we will merge with our machines. Could the Singularity really be near? Something to talk about in next Fall’s Future of Life course.
==
* Postscript: it was one of those weekends, Sunday was even more frantic. I need to install a meter in my Corolla! Or hire a driver.
A guy with a scanner came around to my office one day last week and asked if I had any books I’d care to “recycle.” He sells to wholesalers who re-sell to retailers who re-sell to readers and students. The overlap in those last two categories is not what it could be.
All academics have stacks of unsolicited, unwanted textbooks, of course, pushed on us by publishers who must be anticipating with intense interest the impending roll-out of iPad. Are big, heavy textbooks about to go the way of the dinosaur? And what about the broad non-academic book-consuming public? Will this be the tipping point for people like me? Are my shelves about to become bric-a-brac holders, one more symbol of the void in our time? Is this the end of the book as we’ve known it?
Anyway, his scanner tallied an impressive total for my bottom shelf of big heavy textbooks. I was happy to do business with him.
Then, he aimed the device at what he called the “little guys,” mostly nonfiction trade paperbacks published in the last decade or so on various subjects, not all explicitly philosophical in theme, some of which I’ve used in courses, some I’d forgotten I even had, and– honestly– will never pull out again. Did I want to sell? To my surprise, almost without exception, I did not. Seems I’ve formed an emotional attachment to them, I would miss them even if I never give them quality time and attention ever again. Guess that marks me as a bibliomaniac.
But there was one of those titles, Spirituality and the Secular Quest, that I finally relented on. I haven’t even thought about it in the decade-plus since making its acquaintance, when it promised to shed light on the beliefs and practices of people who describe themselves as spiritual even though they acknowledge no bond of doctrine or community with any historical religion, covering topics like feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation, twelve-step programs, therapy, painting… some of the kind of stuff we’ve been discussing this semester in Atheism & Spirituality class.
This morning I miss it.
At least I can still peek at it through the snippet-bars of Google Books, but they’re not even offering a “limited” visit. And digitized books ain’t books, no-how.
So I have my answer as to the impact iPad likely will have on me personally: I’m still in the book-buying biz too.
He’s soon to face what he calls “the moral business,” the life-changing existential decision either to accept responsibility for his all vocational and personal choices, make the best of them, and live his life… or to throw it all “overboard,” along with his glittering potential. There’s even some doubt at this point as to his commitment to living, period.
He’s also about to learn at first-hand exactly what what Simon Critchley meant about the inadequacy of the Epicurean philosophy to dispel personal grief, with the tragically premature death of a dear friend. But first…
For another aspect of Epicureanism he is a perfect model: the value of friendship, which mattered intensely to him. “I have grown into the belief that friendship… is about the highest joy of earth. Warm, effusive, and gregarious in his outward relations, the inner brooding and worry that accost him periodically do not compromise his social life or his ability and eagerness to connect with others.
But what he’s still missing is a grand passion to live for, and the self-revulsion this precipitates in him comes to a head one evening during a musical performance during a stint of wandering aimlessly through Europe. He suddenly, reflexively feels an unspeakable disgust for the dead drifting of my own life. In his diary he addresses himself (in French): So– you want to die? This is getting serious, and more than abstractly existential. The mental lassitude is mirrored in various physical afflictions, including a bad back.
He finally decides, unenthusiastically, to go home and conclude his medical studies. In June 1869 the 27-year old James sits for his oral examination. “I passed with no difficulty and am entitled to write myself MD if I choose… So there is one epoch of my life closed.”
*And the next is soon upon him: the moral business, and death… (see WJ 3)
Jennifer Hecht contributes a weekly post to “The Best American Poetry” blog, ranging over all kinds of topics including happiness and atheism. Take a look.
She noted recently, at the passing of People’s Historian Howard Zinn (who inspired both impassioned admiration and criticism), that he blurbed Doubt.
And check out her musings on “poetic atheism“: How strange to find our little thinking and blinking faces amid a universe that is for the most part not alive at all. Believers say, “If this weirdness is true, why not believe angels,” but adding nonsense is not helpful.
Hecht is one of the breed of kinder, gentler atheists, like Rebecca Goldstein (of whom a reviewer writes: “Whether or not God exists, in moments of transcendent happiness we all feel a love beyond ourselves, beyond anything. [She] doesn’t want to shake your faith or confirm it”).
Neither shaking nor confirming? Sounds agnostic, though it may simply be “doubtful” and pluralistic. In any case, she has a rich and largely-neglected story to tell. The New Atheists stand on the shoulders of giants. Atheism is not new.
About those Greeks…
Hecht really sheds fresh light, in Doubt: a history, on the naturalizing impulse of the pre-Socratic and Hellenic thinkers. For instance, Democritus (the beautiful regularity of the universe was neither created nor maintained by the guiding intelligence of a god), the Cynics (Diogenes‘ advice is that we stop distracting ourselves with accomplishments, accept the meaninglessness of the universe, lie down on a park bench and get some sun while we have the chance) and Stoics(feeling a part of the community of the universe) and Epicureans(there are no ghostly grownups watching our lives and waiting to punish us… we might as well make an art of appreciating pleasure… in this beautiful moment one is alive) and Skeptics (I do not lay it down that honey is sweet but I admit that it appears to be so), with fresh slants on Socrates (among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth) and Plato (whose form of the Good has been illicitly conflated with God for two millennia).
What I like most in her section on Greek doubt (or as I prefer, Greek spirit): the forest metaphor, which offers the most timeless but (in an age of restless spiritual “cherry [*berry?]-picking”) also timely wisdom: The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest… we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some *blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest… Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time.
As Epicurus realized, it is accepting the finality of death that makes it possible to enjoy the pleasures of the garden. This is a very different garden than the one we got kicked out of in the Eden story. This time you have to eat from the tree of knowledge to get in.
Socrates’ famous final scene, as depicted in Plato’s “Phaedo” and in Jacques-Louis David’s 1786 “Death of Socrates,” suggests a philosopher who has already moved beyond his own end, achieved his personal transcendence (trans-end-dance, as Peter Ackroyd has it, the dance of death), and is more than a bit peeved at the failure of friends and followers to check their grief. And then the pregnant last words: Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Was Plato a faithful scribe? Socrates hadn’t seemed to regard his life as an illness. But in any case, the hemlock did its job and the Philosopher soon was feeling no pain, forevermore. TPM bio, SEP, Trial and Death
He had tried to prepare his friends, in Apology, for a dignified exit: either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. He did not claim any special insight into where he might be going, up or out, and thought it the mere pretense of wisdom to waste a moment’s worry on the subject.
The high point of Socrates’ final days (from a philosopher’s POV) comes when, on his way to face his accusers, he encounters Euthyphro. Euthyphro “knows” (but has never really thought about) the meaning of piety. Socrates, in his inimitable fashion, methodically reveals the fatuousness of Euthyphro’s confidence. The take-away for me is that we must not defer to authorities, human or divine, just because they would “command” our allegiance. We must avoid arbitrariness, apply our reason, and seek the truth.
“There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict. Consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God pleased by displays of unreasoning love is worthy of worship.” Dan Dennett
Socrates believed that virtue is the most valuable of all possessions, that the truth lies beyond the “shadows” of our everyday experience, and that it is the proper business of the philosopher to show us how little we really know. (PW) He lived and died by his principles, never wavering or flinching, never renouncing his chosen life’s-work of encouraging all to join the search for answers to life’s basic questions. (Kind of like Guy Noire.) Most of us would like to think we’ve got an inner Socrates to call on, if we find ourselves in extremis. But it’s hard not to suspect we’ve got an inner Woody, too. In his version of “Apology” the story unfolds differently.
Alain de Botton understands: Socrates’ behavior contrasted so sharply with my own. In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes… I did not publicly doubt ideas to which the majority was committed. I sought the approval of figures of authority…
Philosophical integrity, cultivated through a lifetime of habitual questioning and cross-examination, made it easier for Socrates to resist the crowd and withstand their opprobrium. But Socrates’ great and simple message was that we can all do that, can learn to distinguish what is popular from what is right, and can discover the pleasures of mental freedom with the courage of our rationally-examined convictions. How? Mainly by deciding to attend diligently to the reasons upon which we are prepared to act, questioning popular wisdom, and keeping our conversations alive. Socrates Cafe, anyone?
(Happy Groundhog Day! Rise and shine, Hitch, it’s time to get out of Punxsutawney. Remember, Phil’s only a god. Not the God…)
Christopher Hitchens is the Bad Boy of New Atheism, the most strident,visible non-accommodationist out there. He stands to Dawkins roughly as T.H. Huxley stood to Darwin, a bulldog and verbal brawler who loves polemical confrontation and takes no prisoners, a lightning rod who seems only more energized by reciprocal jolts of scorn and hostility.
Dawkins is nobody’s wallflower, but next to Hitchens he’s positively courtly.
So it might seem a challenge to find in Hitchens a continuation of the positive theme we’ve been accentuating with all our A&S authors so far. More than anyone, Hitchens has earned the reputation and perpetuated the stereotype of atheist-as-naysayer, and of atheism as a negative and depleted worldview.
And yet, his editor’s introduction to The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believercommences with a nod to Albert Camus’ Dr. Rieux (“The Plague”): there are more things to admire in men than to despise. Hitchens is not a misanthrope, he is not Schopenhauer.
A couple of pages on, he’s upholding atheism as the impassioned defender of life in our world: atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it. That’s affirming and positive, no?
And: The Golden Rule is innate in us...the miracle is that there are no miracles or other interruptions of a wondrous natural order. We don’t need ‘em, nature’s wonder enough. The onus shifts, from this perspective, to those whose “death wish” is to leave it all behind on a wing and a prayer for an unseen heaven. What’s nihilistic about loving the world?
Hitchens reiterates a Dawkins point that really ought to go far towards neutralizing the stereotype: everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god– from Ra to Shiva– in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.
He repeats Jonathan Miller’s analogy (I’ve heard this from Sam Harris too): “I do not have a special word for saying that I do not believe in the tooth fairy or in Santa Claus.” But then, the fans of the tooth fairy do not bang on your door and try to convert you. They do not insist that their pseudo-science be taught in schools. They do not condemn believers in rival tooth fairies to death and damnation. A measure of push-back is in order, he’s saying. That’s not pure negativity, it’s strategy.
Then again, his insisting on the more descriptively-accurate moniker “anti-theist” might be construed as a bit gratuitously aggressive. But there’s a positive rationale, to distinguish his view from that of atheists who say that they wish the fable were true. That’s the utter negation of human freedom, which we should be happy to repudiate.
Human life is worth living, on its own terms. And what lovely terms they are, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime and none of them implicated in the supernatural or the oppressions of the coercive-communal: the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature; the consolation and irony of philosophy; the infinite splendors of literature and poetry; the grand resource of art and music and architecture. You can love the Parthenon without joining the cult of Athena.
Hitchens shares Dawkins’ anger about childhood indoctrination, inflicting the terrors of hellfire upon the most innocent, trusting, and vulnerable members of our species. At least the Vatican’s put Limbo on the shelf.
But he also appreciates the power of gentle humor to deconstruct theistic pretense. Why wouldn’t an all-knowing creator reveal some knowledge we might recognize as beyond the ken of uneducated bronze-age shepherds?
Hitchens has no use for Stephen Jay Gould’s Nonoverlapping Magisteria or for theistic evolution in general. Either one attributes one’s presence here to the laws of biology and physics, or one attributes it to a divine design. If you try to have it both ways you must embrace what he caricatures as a most ridiculous scenario: for all these millennia, heaven watched with indifference and then– and only in the last six thousand years at the very least– decided that it was time to intervene as well as redeem… The willingness even to entertain such elaborately mad ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief.
Hitchens’ combative posture, let’s admit, makes for entertaining spectacle. But will it succeed strategically, in winning non-theists a more prominent and respected voice in the public discourse of our times? Can it be balanced and modulated by the more temperate tones of a Sweeney or a Hecht or… or who? Where will the next generation of Sagans and Goulds come from, when the time for armed resistance has passed?
With today’s Passion for Wisdom assignment we have another go at classical Chinese philosophers and the pre-Socratics, and Buddhists and Jains and Sophists. Then, Socrates himself (who was not “permanently pissed,” after all).
Buddhists reject the Hindu self, leaving some doubt about what it is that could possibly cycle through successive incarnations or reap the weal or woe of karma. But Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains all exalt the quest for a trance-like blissful experience, and resist what they see as western “over-intellectualization” of the sort Pooh’s friend Owl seems to exemplify.
And of course Buddhists are known for the “Noble Truths” of suffering and the “Eightfold Path” to Enlightenment which begins with seeing* (the very meaning of the Sanskrit word for philosophy) and seeks Nirvana– not happiness in the western sense, but an ego-displacing perspective that looks very alluring to some western neophytes who wish they could twinkle and glow like the current Dalai Lama too.
Also very appealing to many of us is Buddhist compassion, exemplified for me (though I can’t quite explain why) in a particular photograph of the DL with a certain former heavyweight champion; and the DL’s forthright “faith in science“. There’s a strong Socratic element in Buddhism’s claim that the “illusion of understanding” blocks our way to enlightenment… as there is in the scientific method and its ethos of fallibilism.
Less appealing to me is the concept of ”renunciation” and the judgment of the everyday world as itself a grand illusion. I like the response of the logically-minded Nyayayikas, who ”rejected the notion that the everyday world was an illusion.” Transitory yes, but unreal? No.
One of the most striking images here clarifies the Taoist conception 0f “soul” as an impersonal part of nature. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, by contrast, one is holy insofar as one is not part of nature and is outside of time… The Christian soul is an intact bit of eternity in everyone. The Taoist soul is more like a drop of water in a stream. Again: Taoists believe that to be wise is to realize one’s unity with nature and to live in conjunction with nature’s rhythm, the Tao… The personal self may die, but the Tao with which the sage identifies lives on.
Speaking of water… Thales of Miletus (634-546 BCE) said water was the nature, the archê, the originating principle of all reality. With his olive presses he resisted the charge of “unworldliness” so often lodged against philosophers.
Earth, air, fire, and water, hot and cold, wet and dry… Opposition is often basic to Greek philosophy, whereas the Chinese would rather talk about ‘harmony’…
The ancient Greeks referred to all other peoples as barbarians (whose unintelligible speech sounded to them like “bar-bar-bar”). Herodotus: “the Greeks have been from very ancient times distinguished from the barbarians by superior sagacity and freedom from foolish simpleness.” This cultural chauvinism persists, apparently, and was delightfully exemplified by the proud Greek father in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (finding uncredited Greek origins for everything, including Japanese kimonos).
But they do have plenty to be proud of, including Hippocrates’ (c.460-377 BCE) naturalism: “Men think [a disease] divine merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.”
Democritus (460-370 BCE), ”The Laughing Philosopher,” expanded the atomic theory of Leucippus and agreed with Pythagoras: “the Cosmos can be understood because it obeys certain laws that are the same everywhere in the universe.” This proposition is the foundation of science. Carl Sagan thought a lot of him (and Steve Gould thought a lot of Sagan).
With Democritus the attempt to deanimate and demythologize the world was complete. Greek “soul” was insubstantial except when embodied, and then was a “mere breath.” Something like this view, incidentally, led the Egyptians to mummify their dead, and the early Christians to emphasize physical resurrection as necessary for salvation. The ancient Hebrews mostly restricted their concern to the concrete human being, not soul. Similarly, the Chinese related soul to social identity without specific metaphysical expectations. (Buddhists, again, thought soul was either an illusion or– as the Taoists said– was one with the rest of the universe, rejecting the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth.) As for the modern scientific take on soul, it looks a lot like Democritus’s… but Michael Shermer says the soul of science is substantial enough.
Protagoras (c. 490 – c. 420 BCE ) said (1) that man is the measure of all things (which is often interpreted as a sort of radical relativism) (2) that he could make the “worse (or weaker) argument appear the better (or stronger)” and (3) that one could not tell if the gods existed or not. He and his peers were sophists, and are at least partly responsible for giving it a bad name. Sophistry, or subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation, leads to the cliche that a “good” philosopher (or lawyer) can prove anything.
But the philosophy of Protagoras does not have to be read as sophistry, mercenary argumentation offered for a fee. It might be seen as confidence in our ability to know the world because we view it in human terms– a view later associated with the German Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Or, it could be viewed as a precursor to pragmatism and an attempt to render thought practical and useful.
Next up: Socrates on Wednesday. Intro students: read Alain de Botton’s chapter “Consolation for Unpopularity.”
It's Ecclesiastes (and Job) Day in A&S, and I can't get this out of my head. Might as well spread the meme around...To everything there is a season... a time to be born, and a time to die... There is nothing for a person to do but "to rejoice, and to do good in his life." It is a comforting speech, but the mood doesn't hold. Jenn […]
